The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 4

A noise startled her from her reverie, a m.u.f.fled sound that seemed to come from a great distance. A voice calling to her? The guide stirred, lifting his oil lamp and walking to the entry. He c.o.c.ked his head, then signaled her to follow. She packed up her pen and book.

Climbing out of the entrance, Flo saw a man with a tripod, taking pictures. She hesitated before standing, worried she might ruin his photograph, but he paid her no mind. Charles called out to her and she waved back. It was time to return to the houseboat. She scurried past the photographer without glimpsing his face.

People were scattered about the deck of the dahabiyah, taking the evening air, all except Trout who was already asleep in the stuffy cabin below. Flo shifted in her chair. The dark blue pennant announcing the name of their vessel as the Parthenope that Flo had sewn from a petticoat and her only roll of white seam tape waved languidly on the flagpole.

Charles was snoring in the low chair and footstool he favored for naps. Selina, too, had drifted off, Florence saw, the downy globe of one cheek pressed into her shoulder while her hand lay inert over her open book, the fingers grazing the words that had sent her sliding over the edge of attention into a delicious postprandial slumber.

One of the crew stood smoking a water pipe at the bow of the boat. He caught Flo's eye, nodded, and then turned back, white ruffles of smoke about his neck like a jabot.

The wind stirred, lifting the unbound hair at her nape. It was the dry season in Egypt, travel of course being impossible in the summer, when the river flooded, that great upheaval of nourishing mud to which had been attributed ancient Egypt's accomplishments-the pyramids, the gilt sarcophagi, the obelisks and tombs. The air on winter evenings tended to be clear and bracing, though occasionally the desert churned up a wind that p.r.i.c.kled with minute particles of sand, and then it was like seeing through scratchy golden gauze. That same dust, suspended in the air, could hue the sunsets in deep reds and purples. Tonight, happily, the air was clear, the sky a mesh of stars under a fingernail moon, perfect subject for a nightscape painting.

She suddenly recalled the photographer outside the temple. Of course, it must have been M. Du Camp! He had said that he planned to record Abu Simbel in detail. That meant his companion, M. Flaubert, was somewhere about, pressing wet paper onto dry stone. He was the quieter of the two, but the more interesting, she suspected.

5.

LETTERS.

The cange lay at anchor immediately to the north of the small rock temple. The sun was just setting, though Gustave did not know the exact hour. He'd abandoned exact.i.tudes. The clockwork universe he'd studied at the royal college had stopped ticking in Egypt, where the complete engagement of the senses jumbled whatever order he might once have grasped. These days he was more plant than man, a thing responding bodily to the life-giving exhalations of the Nile. Rather than clothe himself with Western logic, he preferred to venture forth naked. If it rained, he sucked it up like an elixir into his marrow. When the sun poured down warmth and light, he turned toward it, troposcopic as a sunflower, or away from it, like a parched tortoise. He was all reactive tissue, something his father might once have prodded in a laboratory dish. He allowed no energy for serious thought or long-term planning. Planning-the emblem of the bourgeois herd of which he only occasionally acknowledged himself a dissident member-was anathema. What future awaited him back in France? What kind of books would he write? Would he attempt to publish? He refused to contemplate any of it.

Inside the sleeping cabin, the lamp he held shed a golden annulus within a fainter penumbra of ocher. The textures and hues of the room continued vibrant in the dim light. The red and blue geometrics of the divan covers fashioned from kilim rugs, the Persian carpet on the floor, the froth of mosquito netting pendant from the ceiling-all invited the hand of a painter or a writer. For the sake of this bellyful of colors, he was willing to endure the ubiquitous fleas and biting flies, the pestilential invasions of rats along the tow ropes from the docks.

"Bring the light closer," Max said, hiking up his robe.

Just then, Joseph called down from the upper deck. "A runner is come with post, effendis."

"We will attend to it shortly," Max replied, intent on centering his groin in the brightest part of the light.

Gustave peered at seven blisters on the head and shaft of his friend's n.o.ble part. Max retracted his foreskin, the better to expose them.

"The fellow looks angry," Gustave said. "A gift from one of the dancing girls?"

"No doubt. I'll see a proper doctor when we return to Cairo. None in these parts, I'm sure."

Max was right. What pa.s.sed for medicine in Upper Egypt was superst.i.tion verging on perversity. In Kom Ombo, he'd seen barren women exposing their bellies to the urine stream of idiots. Even in Cairo, consumptives routinely kissed the genitals of dervishes in hopes of a cure. "Do they hurt, mon ami?"

"I feel them. What about you? Have you checked yourself?"

"Yes. I'm all right."

"I wonder if this little gathering of blisters could be the result of riding in the desert, the sand rubbing me raw."

Gustave shook his head. "I would not think so." He lowered the lamp onto the table. "Sand wouldn't cause discrete sores, would it?"

"The doctor's son speaks and I listen, effendi." Max pulled up his underwear and sat on the divan. The normally lighthearted expression on his face flagged. "My first case of the pox."

"I hope not." Gustave moved the lamp to the top of a small bookcase and sat down opposite Max. "No, I think with the pox you have only one sore." Years before, when he had lost his virginity to a house-maid in Rouen, he thought he had syphilis. Too ashamed to tell his father, he'd conferred instead with the pharmacist, who had dispensed a salve that cleared up his rash in short order. Pox was so common that one could not worry about it and live a normal life. Nevertheless, sometimes he did worry about it. He did not wish to lose his mind, following his teeth and hair. In Cairo he had made a side trip without Max to an asylum attached to the mosque of Sultan Kalaoon, thinking to disport himself with lunatics. There, he had come upon a room of syphilitics in every stage of the disease. A dozen stood bent over at the waist, their pelisses. .h.i.tched up around their bellies the better to show the doctor their b.l.o.o.d.y, chancred a.s.sholes. He'd vowed a lifetime of abstinence on the spot, knowing he wouldn't stick to it.

"I have dipped my pen into too many inkpots," Max said, pouring himself half a tumbler of wine.

They'd finished the good French brandy allotted for the Nile cruise. A dozen more bottles were stored with the rest of their belongings at the villa of Suleiman Pasha in Alexandria. The crew of the cange, all Mahometans, didn't admit to consuming alcohol, but had no trouble securing contraband rice wine for the Franks.

Max began to putter with his photographs.

"I'm going up for some air," Gustave told him. "And to get the post."

On a charcoal burner at the bow, Joseph was preparing a hearty dinner of roasted lamb, rice, olives, and fava beans. Given the circ.u.mstances, the dragoman's cooking was delectable. And to ensure satiety, they stocked dates, almonds, onions, and bread on board, a combination primed for dyspepsia. Gustave had a strong and ever-enlarging stomach. Before leaving Alexandria, he had to have his best trousers altered to attend a banquet at Suleiman Pasha's. His girth had continued to increase on a diet of Ottoman and Egyptian cuisine. He was particularly fond of meat and cheese pies, called brek in Turkish and sanbusa in Arabic, and of baklava, a dessert that appeared on tinned trays in all its declensions with charming names such as "bird's nest," and "maiden's thigh."

Captain Ibrahim was lounging upwind of the brazier, his feet dangling over the bow. Seeing Gustave, he pointed toward his sleeping niche, a recess in the deck where he and the crew slept, as if packed in long boxes. There, tied up in a piece of cloth, Gustave found the post.

A letter from dear Bouilhet, another from Maman, and a third he didn't recognize. The consul had probably tossed in the month-old issue of La Presse. He'd save it for after dinner, while he smoked.

With his back to the river, he sat in a chair on the port side to read. His mother missed him and sent kisses. Baby Caroline was flourishing, stringing her words into sentences and torturing the cats, which vanished like startled snakes when she toddled into a room. His mother urged him to continue his letters, no matter how brief or haphazard. She closed with bear hugs.

Bouilhet's letter smacked of his usual sa.s.s. Gustave read it quickly, chuckling, knowing he'd savor it again in a day or two. Bouilhet had been a scholarship boy at Gustave's preparatory school, but they weren't close until university. The first time he laid eyes on Bouilhet there he had thought he was looking into a mirror or a pane of gla.s.s struck by the light to reflect his gaze. Since they were both students, even their clothing was similar. A year after their reunion, Bouilhet had left school for lack of funds, but the friendship had continued. He supported himself by tutoring students in Latin and Greek, leaving him time to work on his epic poem, Melaenis, several new stanzas of which he'd copied on a separate sheet.

The third envelope was cream-colored and thick. The paper, slick to the touch, was the kind he liked to use because it allowed his quill to skim along as fast as he could think, and absorbed the ink nicely. High cotton content, no doubt. He was attuned to the few sensual pleasures of his desk: papers, pens, nibs, inks-even pen wipes-provided a particular visual tang, a texture, an odor. He sniffed the envelope. No perfume. The imprint on the sealing wax was illegible. Carefully, he drew his penknife along the top and withdrew three crisp sheets, evenly folded. The hand was a woman's, orderly and pretty. Not like Louise's, who wrote in a great looping rush. At the height of their affair, she wrote him three times a day, each letter a more volcanic outpouring than the last. He'd kept his departure a secret so he didn't have to bid her farewell. He wanted only silence from her. As to why he was buying her gifts, he hadn't a clue.

This missive was from Miss Nightingale. He examined the envelope again: there was no sign that it had pa.s.sed through the post office at Alexandria, which would explain how it had reached him so quickly. No doubt, the natives knew where each European party was camped on any given day. The letter had been sped to him via grapevine.

A drawing on the third page caught his eye. He thought it was a sketch of a mummy, but on closer inspection, he noticed that the writer had drawn eyes and a smile on the exposed face of a figure otherwise completely enshrouded. He stroked the smiling face with his forefinger and studied the diagram. Its precision and lighthearted detail indicated a warmth and jocularity he hadn't detected in Miss Nightingale on the road.

He admired the letter's fluency and vivacity. As he read, appetizing whiffs of roast lamb and beans, the clean scent of steamed rice, wafted over him. Whenever he reread the letter years later, he was haunted by a vague memory of hunger-of heightened awareness and the antic.i.p.ation of pleasure. But now he tempered his enthusiasm. He was wary of Englishwomen, as he seemed especially susceptible to their charms. He had discovered this with Gertrude and Harriet Collier.

He had met the sisters on the beach at Trouville when he was nineteen. They might have remained casual summer acquaintances but for a freakish fire in their cottage. He had spotted the flames and carried Harriet, the invalid sister, to safety in his arms. Afterward, when she suffered from nightmares, Dr. Flaubert insisted on caring for her at home. At Rouen, Gustave and Caroline countered her demons with card games and puppet plays. The trio became fast friends.

When he moved to Paris for law school, he called on the sisters at their house on the Champs-elysees. At first his visits were chatty family affairs, with Captain and Mrs. Collier in attendance. Because the entire family held writers in the highest regard, he felt especially welcome. They shared his enthusiasm for Hugo, Byron, and Wordsworth, for Chateaubriand and Shakespeare. Both sisters were bluestockings, versed in the cla.s.sics and contemporary literature. He confided to them that he had written a book called Novembre, and read some of it aloud. Chez Collier he felt safe and appreciated.

Both girls were appealing. Gertrude was lively and rambunctious, her cheeks rosy with good health, while Harriet radiated the languishing beauty of the semi-invalid, that incandescent pallor that haunted the pages of his beloved Romantics. Both were devout and decorous, attending church every Sunday and abiding strictly by the rules of chaperonage. The three of them never left the house. This made for a less direct sort of coquetry than he was accustomed to. Flirtations took the form of verbal fencing, particularly for Harriet, whose wit was sufficiently nimble to trade innuendos and double entendres.

Slowly, like a net drifting to the bottom of the sea, his interest settled on her. Her large blue eyes and slightly disheveled clothes were uniquely alluring. She had a spinal disorder and usually lay stretched out in fetching poses on the sofa or chaise longue. Chronic debility lent her an ethereal air. And while he could pinpoint no obvious changes, over the months her demeanor increasingly hinted that she desired him. Was he imagining it, or did her poses and gestures sometimes verge on the overtly suggestive?

He began to daydream obsessively about her-lurid, priapic scenarios in which he rescued and then made pa.s.sionate love to her. She intruded on his s.e.x life with prost.i.tutes. While a wh.o.r.e was fellating him, he'd picture Harriet on her back, clothed in petticoats and a camisole, her eyes half closed, her legs beginning to fall open. Sometimes, when he visited her, he had to camouflage his arousal by remaining seated with a book in his lap.

These fantasies had no future-which made them more ardent-because even Harriet, with her reduced prospects for a husband, was afflicted with that peculiar English virtue a strong sense of duty. Gertrude sometimes called it "constancy of purpose," speaking in English as though the idea could not be translated because it didn't exist in French. Perhaps it didn't. Nor did he comprehend this duty. He knew it wasn't confined to s.e.x, but wreaked the greatest havoc there. Englishwomen knew nothing about their bodies. Alfred, his closest confidant in things venereal, had once bedded an English maid who did not know what or where the c.l.i.toris was. Was it possible in the year 1843 that an educated woman like Harriet Collier was ignorant of her magic b.u.t.ton? Alfred claimed his English maid had never m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed and that after he taught her how, she declared him superfluous.

One day, shortly before he failed his second-year law exams, he found himself alone with Harriet. Gertrude had gone to fetch a book from the library. He was sitting next to her on the sofa, reading aloud, when she took his hand and entwined her fingers with his. A preternatural light in her eyes seemed to draw him into their blueness, pulling him into the vortex of her gaze. She lifted his hand to her pale lips and lightly kissed each fingertip.

Just then, Mrs. Collier paused in the doorway with a smile on her face that chilled him to the bone. When he turned back to Harriet, the expression on her face alarmed him even more, for she appeared to be begging for his love, for a respectable future with him in a house like the one in which he suddenly felt like a captive. His stomach flopped over. He must have blanched. He withdrew his hand. When Gertrude returned with her book, he made his excuses and fled, never to return.

Outside in the street, he wanted to scream out of guilt and shame. What courage she must have marshaled to take his hand! And those exquisite, gauzy fingertip kisses! If Mrs. Collier hadn't inadvertently rescued him with that vulgar smile when she thought she'd glimpsed a potential son-in-law, he might have promised Harriet anything. How weak and softhearted he was, how easily seduced! His contempt for marriage, his years of indiscriminate s.e.x had been insufficient defense. He was still a romantic! As a corrective, he remained celibate for the next four months.

He didn't know what had happened to Harriet. Gertrude had married and become a patron of the arts. Probably no suitor had claimed Harriet because of her weak const.i.tution and the presumption she couldn't carry an infant to term. What an elegant spinster she would make, clad in dark dresses befitting one no longer prowling for a mate, but set off to one side, like a beautiful vase reduced to holding umbrellas. From time to time he allowed himself to remember her: faintly damp with fever, wearing a fawn silk gown and roses in her hair, she reclined upon a brocade settee or draped herself over an armchair, lank as a set of clothes awaiting their owner to gather them up and put them on.

My dear Miss Nightingale: Your letter reached me within two days, carried, I think, on the back of a donkey without benefit of franking but rather because a Mahmoud knew an Essem, who knew an Ismael, who had heard of a Youssef and here it is, in my hand. I hope that mine to you will travel as swiftly.

I owe you a debt of thanks for taking the time to explain the levinge and save me from "the biting hordes." You are right-the standard mosquito netting is insufficient, and I have the welts to prove it!

What a lovely name you have, especially in French: Rossignol. And may I say that I find your French charming, far superior to my jagged shards of English. I hope one day to learn English well enough to read Shakespeare without a dictionary.

We've dropped anchor downriver from Abu Simbel, in a little cove. I wonder if you are nearby and if you have yet seen the mammoth statues of Ramses that flank the great temple. Max is excavating one Ramses for the sake of the official photographs he has been commissioned to make. (As I may have told you, I am doc.u.menting the monuments by making archaeological squeezes or molds of the inscriptions, though I am not an archaeologist.) I find it fascinating that the Egyptians and Nubians who live with these splendid monuments have so little feeling for them. They walk past them with no curiosity, as if they were old concert posters on a kiosk.

I regret that I did not meet your traveling companions, but perhaps the opportunity will yet present itself.

I have acquired an Arabic nickname, Abu Chanab, which means "Father Mustache." Max is called "the Father of Thinness," an apt description. Has your crew told you their nicknames for your party? Ask your dragoman and hope he is not too shy to tell you. Egypt seems a place where one requires an epithet. I shall call you Rossignol, my songbird, until you tell me another.

We shall be working here for at least another week, so perhaps we shall see you and your party again. I hope so.

I hereby swear that we have done no shooting among crowds, that we have shot only turtledoves for our larder and the odd eagle and lammergeier, the first for the sake of the feathers, the second because the sight of these huge, impatient buzzards strikes panic into my heart. (Max and I lay motionless for a time on the sand as an experiment the other day, and within minutes they began circling overhead.) We are sailing in a twelve-meter-long cange painted blue (six windows to a side) and flying the tricolors from the stern. Are you sailing under the English flag? How would I know your boat?

From your humble servant,

Father Mustache, to the songbird,

Gustave Flaubert

He stoked his chibouk, lit it, inhaled, and blew a stream of bluish smoke into the night. At home, it was a rare day that he did not smoke thirty bowls, particularly if he were writing. A pure pleasure, like masturbating. He watched the smoke curl upward and dissipate. Indistinguishable voices wafted across the river from the opposite sh.o.r.e, where a bonfire sent flames leaping into the sky. The palm trees behind it, washed in red light, looked like giant branches of sea coral.

He decided to reread the letter, not because he might change it, but because he was pleased with it.

Such an angelic tone! What propriety coming from the doyen of doxies, the connoisseur of c.u.n.ts, the headmaster of hussies. But, of course, one could not be one's self with women, especially a new acquaintance.

No, it seemed that only with wh.o.r.es could he be true to his nature, indulging the h.o.r.n.y beast and following his l.u.s.ty whims into every crack, hole, and fold of their bodies. As for sharing his intellectual side, his love of the arts and a well-reasoned dismissal of all things bourgeois, only men had proved to be satisfying partners.

Closing the envelope with his letter in it, he applied a glob of red sealing wax. What wife would wish to hear him curse with virtuosity and then discuss King Lear? One with the mind of a man and the obscenity of a wh.o.r.e? Such a woman did not exist. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to picture Miss Nightingale's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which would be small and perky, with nipples, he guessed, the color of stewed prunes.

After dinner, Max got out his guidebook and spread a map on the table, a twin of the one he'd given Madame Flaubert. No doubt she studied it longingly each evening, tacked to a wall in her boudoir.

The map appeared antique, the result of the lamplight and its many creases, smears, and fingerprints. Max had opened it so many times to pencil in notes and dates that the folds had the soft, fuzzy pile of velvet. Now he traced the river north from Abu Simbel with his finger, reciting the places they might visit on the second half of their Nile journey: Dendur, to see the Roman temple there, Philae, the jewel of the Nile, Edfu, Esneh again, Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes.

Esneh, where Kuchuk Hanem lived. Gustave sat smoking quietly.

Max's finger came to rest on Kenneh, a small city where the river veered sharply east, then flowed in a gentle arc northwesterly again. His finger began to tap. Instead of following the course of the river, it moved into the Arabian desert. "I wonder," Max began. "Look at this!" He stood up, tipping over his stool. "I say, Garcon! Are you listening to me, Short Pants?" He rapped his knuckles on the table. "M. Descambeaux! I am calling on you, you dunce."

"Descambeaux at your service, sir," Gustave replied, suppressing a pang of sadness. Poor Alfred. And poor Caroline. Alfred had invented Le Garcon, and Caroline had given the imaginary clown his family name. "I just need to take a s.h.i.t to clear my head." He squatted and pretended to fart loudly.

"Point your a.s.s in the other direction, please. I am trying to think."

"Thinking? I've heard that's dangerous. The grocer told me it makes your p.r.i.c.k shrivel up and fall off. Thinking too much will make you go blind. Spend every spare moment jerking off. You've got to keep yourself well oiled, like a proper gun."

"Oh, Garcon"-Max laughed-"have you not a single brain in your head?"

"Just one, like everybody else. And now, I must go s.h.i.t out a word or two, inspired by the moonlight. I feel a poem coming on, like a cramp."

"What a waste of time you are! But truly, Short Pants, I have a brilliant idea." Max righted the stool and sat back down. He rotated the map toward Gustave. "Have a look. From Kenneh, we could travel east to Koseir."

Gustave followed Max's finger from Kenneh across a blank area to a circle. "What's in Koseir?"

"Garcon, you are hopeless. What's in Koseir? Have you never heard of it?"

The dot on the map was tiny; a squashed flea was bigger. "I haven't, O great Sheik Abu Dimple."

"I'll tell you what, Garcon- the Red Sea."

It was an electrifying proposition, and Max was correct: Kenneh appeared to be the closest jumping-off point anywhere along the Nile.

While Gustave flipped through Max's guidebook, Max measured the distance between the two points. "How many days would it take to cross the desert there?" he wondered aloud.

Gustave read to him. "'Travelers returning from India often pa.s.s through Koseir.'" He skimmed along, reading to himself. "Ah! Here's something of interest. Instructions about thrashing. 'The fellah should be thrashed beforehand, to remind him who is in authority. However, if you mistake a Bedouin for a fellah, he might kill you for striking him.'" He closed the book. "We shall have to buy a cudgel."

"What's a fellah?" Max asked.

"Don't know."

"Seriously, I shall talk to Captain Ibrahim. It's our one chance for the Red Sea."

Gustave, usually rather phlegmatic, jumped up and spun around. "Yes! I must swim in the Red Sea." And he wanted to be able to say he swam in the Red Sea, and most of all, he wanted the memory of swimming in the Red Sea, for memory was wealth to him, and he was anxious to fill his coffers. Saint Anthony, he recalled, had spent the last fifty years of his life living on the sh.o.r.e of the Red Sea. Just in case he ever worked on the book again.

He leaned down to peer through the windows of the cange. In the sky hung a slender crescent moon, tilted backward. A bright C-shaped haze surrounded it, beyond which mult.i.tudinous stars glimmered through wispy clouds. He stuck his head out the window and breathed in the mist rising off the Nile, which was cool and damp, like the air after a soaking rain.

After Max and the crew had retired for the night, Gustave sat alone on deck with a candle. He could hear the crewmen snoring, rustling in their sleep. One lone fellow stood sentry at the stern.